What are the jobs of the future? How many will there be? And who will have them? We might imagine—and hope—that today’s industrial revolution will unfold like the last: even as some jobs are eliminated, more will be created to deal with the new innovations of a new era. In Rise of the Robots, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Martin Ford argues that this is absolutely not the case. As technology continues to accelerate and machines begin taking care of themselves, fewer people will be necessary. Artificial intelligence is already well on its way to making “good jobs” obsolete: many paralegals, journalists, office workers, and even computer programmers are poised to be replaced by robots and smart software. As progress continues, blue and white collar jobs alike will evaporate, squeezing working- and middle-class families ever further. At the same time, households are under assault from exploding costs, especially from the two major industries—education and health care—that, so far, have not been transformed by information technology. The result could well be massive unemployment and inequality as well as the implosion of the consumer economy itself.

In Rise of the Robots, Ford details what machine intelligence and robotics can accomplish, and implores employers, scholars, and policy makers alike to face the implications. The past solutions to technological disruption, especially more training and education, aren’t going to work.

It all sounds dire enough, but today I want to step away from the dueling camps AI and sophisticated technology in general seem to call out in people (I’ve called them The Believers and The Deniers) and suggest a more practical approach for how you and your firm ought to address this right here right now.

As regular readers know, I often find McKinsey’s analyses to be refreshingly free of dross, cant, and embedded bias. There’s a reason they’re McKinsey, I suppose. So our text for today is Four fundamentals of workplace automation, which presents a useful framework for thinking about how AI is and may in future actually play out in workplaces across the country and across the globe. As we’ve come to find customary with McKinsey, the dataset underlying their analysis is exhaustive: In this case, breaking down actual workplace activities into roughly 2,000 individual procedures and then overlyaying on top of that “18 different capabilities that potentialy could be automated.”

To give you a flavor of what this actually means, here are some of the activities, using retail as an example:

greet customers

answer questions about products

demonstrate products

process transactions

maintain the store itself.

And the capabilities:

social and emotional sensing

understanding natural language

generating natural language

recognizing patterns

retrieving information

being mobile

being able to navigate a physical environment.

Can you say “granular?” That of course is the point. And it leads them directly to their core insight: It makes no sense to talk or think in terms of automating “jobs,” “occupations,” or, more pointedly for the current audience, “professions.” It only makes sense to talk or think in terms of automating “activities”—which require underlying “capabilities” if they are to be performed satisfactorily. By the way, if you’re wondering about computers’ ability to understand natural language, this past summer Apple claimed that Siri was down to a 5% word error rate, which is far from perfect but realistically good enough for most day to day interactions. More importantly to my way of thinking, Apple also reported that Siri was serving over a billion requests per week, which reinforces the power of relentless continuous improvement that’s part and parcel of technology these days.

So if we recast the debate in those terms, where do we stand?

According to our analysis, fewer than 5 percent of occupations can be entirely automated using current technology. However, about 60 percent of occupations could have 30 percent or more of their constituent activities automated. In other words, automation is likely to change the vast majority of occupations—at least to some degree—which will necessitate significant job redefinition and a transformation of business processes.

Right around here many of you—this is just a hunch, folks—are probably imagining that that “30% of the 60%” estimate is highly correlated with relatively low-wage, low-skill jobs. Our authors would beg to differ, and they have an r2 calculation to prove it.

1 Comment

Mark J. Logsdon
on November 30, 2015 at 4:16 pm

How one responds to these ideas seems likely to be related to how one conceptualizes time with respect to the firm. If one sees her assignment as that of a steward for a firm with both a history and a future, then considering the situations that will be faced in one and two (or more) generations and preparing for them will cause such topics as you raise here to resonate in one way. If we are mired in the crush of daily competition, struggling with what to say to the kill-what-you-eat partners at the end of the Quarter, wondering where the working capital would come from to invest in what is effectively R&D, then the McKinsey-ASE narrative probably still sounds like science fiction.